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Digital National Security Archive: now via ProQuest

Our subscription to the Digital National Security Archive has moved from its own site to be incorporated into the ProQuest platform. If you’re used to using our other ProQuest resources (Historic Newspapers, American Periodicals, Ethnic NewsWatch, Dissertations & Theses among others), the new search interface will be familiar to you, and as with our other ProQuest subscriptions, it will now be possible to cross-search these with the DNSA.

Using DNSA Collections on ProQuest

DNSA is arranged as a number of thematic collections, which could be searched individually. There are three ways to do this now it has moved to ProQuest:

From the basic search screen, the collections are listed at the bottom of the page (click ‘show all’ to see the full list). Clicking on any of these collections will take you to a search screen for just that collection.

From the advanced search screen, you can select some or all DNSA collections in the ‘search options’ underneath the search boxes.

Using the ‘select databases‘ option in the blue bar at the top of the screen. Click where it says ‘searching 1 database’ to expand the list, and then you can select whichever ProQuest databases you choose. If you scroll down to select Digital National Security Archive you will see a + sign; clicking on that will expand a further list of the individual DNSA collections for you to select or deselect. This is also how you can cross-search DNSA with other ProQuest databases subscribed to by Oxford.

Using DNSA Bibliographies, Chronologies and Glossaries on ProQuest

As well as the documents themselves, the collections were supported by additional descriptive materials, providing background information on the collections, history, and documents. These are still accessible via ProQuest but are a little bit less obvious to find. To get to them, click on ‘browse’ next to the advanced search link:

You can also search the bibliographies, chronologies and glossaries from the advanced search screen by selecting them in the first of the search options under the search boxes:

Exporting saved searches and references from My Archive – important!

If you used the My Archive feature on the old DNSA site, your saved searches and references will not have transferred to the new ProQuest platform. The old site will remain available at http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/until late summer, so if you have saved searches and references you have some time to retrieve them before it gets shut down. ProQuest have written up a guide to how to export your data from My Archive so that you don’t lose them. On ProQuest, it is possible to save searches and documents in much the same way using their My Research feature, but you would need to recreate any searches or saved documents from DNSA manually there.